Update / Translation Discussion (Patreon)

Hey baby!

The sketch is by the amazing Luka (MoonlittArts) as usual, thinking of using it for a T-Shirt design, let me know if you're interested in that! https://twitter.com/MoonLitt_Arts

New video just needs some polishing now, it's so close ><

Meanwhile, I've been thinking about translating my work so it can reach more of the disaffected and lost. Here are my thoughts:

As it is now, I have a few videos with auto-translated subtitles, a task that is difficult on it's own, but not too impossible. they are said to be around 60-80% readable, particularly due to my obscure subject matter and humor being hard to translate through automatic means. MY work is also very visual at times, and not slow paced the way other media that succeeds in the realm of subtitles is. The advantage would seem to be that this strategy centers activity on one channel, and thus boosts it. But it also remains to be seen if bothering with these will actually bring in non-english speakers.  

Right now, the process for that is creating a good english subtitle track, then genericifying some of the more spicy words or jokes, then auto-translating to every important language, then putting the english subtitle back to accurate wording, then manually going through and translating titles and descriptions for each language. This is quite tedious, and dubiously worthwhile, as the question remains whether this will cause problems with the algorithm, or encourage growth.

So I was thinking, perhaps I should create dubs of my best videos and upload them to a separate channel focused on that language. Ideally this would be done with the most popular languages in the world. Here are the considerations:

With my current income translation work seems inviably expensive atm near $450-600 CAD for translation of 50 minutes of dialogue to one language. I could then create a text-to-speech to read it for a separate version of the video, ideally I would do this for the top 10 most common languages in the world.

The advantage of this would be that I don't have to spend more to have a voice actor read it. The disadvantage is that I wont know when the voice reads things wrong or the tone is off, when such things may be common. There's also the problem of text-to-speech of other languages typically having less variety, and some times the voice may be well known and generic, or low quality.

That doesn't even cover the strange photoshopping work that would be involved in translating memes, and the troubles in communicating humor or culture across language barriers. MAny memes would hold little to no relevance across culture barriers.

If I took the route of paying an actor to read the script, it may cost upwards of $1700, and regardless, there may be errors of translation and tone in this process. Beyond that, it will be a task in itself to cut and reshape the video around the newly recorded dialogue while not understanding the language myself, something I'm perfectly willing to tackle. But then, can I find someone who accurately represents my inner voice, and doesn't mind the content or me?

Then, would I have to make a separate youtube channel for that separate language? IT seems likely. Starting a new channel might be best, but it will also cause a slow start and growth. Should i change my name to reflect a local language joke? Which versions of "spanish" or "chinese" should i focus on to get the most reach?

Any ways, that is my thoughts, if you have any ideas or want to contribute in some way, I would really appreciate it.